BEN MILO

The Beginning of a Crime Story

When Ben Milo returned to his cabin he put on the coffee pot. That was pure habit, of course, the ingrained pattern of years. Then he stood in the middle of the room and tried to think it out.

He had seen the car come bounding and plunging over the desert as if driven by a madman. Certainly, nobody who knew this country would drive like that, or even venture onto his old trail in anything without four-wheel drive. It was a burro trail, not a highway.

A few years back he would have waited cynically for them to come, wiry, able, confident. But his mind worked a little slower now and arthritis had stiffened the hands that had once handled a gun with deadly speed. Ben Milo had been born to hard country and rough living; however, that was eighty-six years ago.

Ben had been an outlaw for too many of those years but his lawless deeds lay buried in the graves of his generation. If anyone suspected him now it was that young highway patrolman, Jim Garrity, who was always asking questions about the old days.

Ben Milo liked Garrity. He was a salty youngster, fit to have walked with the old breed. They had worked together a time or two…like when that Prescott youngster was lost over east. Ben’s eyes were not much for reading print, but he could still read sign. They trailed that youngster nine miles over the badlands before they found him.

Three times since then Garrity had called on Ben to lend a hand and each time they had found what they went after. Old…yes, Ben Milo was old, but he could still walk twenty miles in any kind of weather and over almost any kind of country.

When he first saw the car he had stopped to watch. It was shining and new, but when it hit the wash below his place it stopped as he knew it would. By direct travel, up and over the hillside, the wash was only ten minutes from his shack, but by the trail it was a good hour of walking around the rocky backbone of a mountain that thrust up boldly from the desert.

He knew that wash, and nothing short of a tractor was likely to get them out of it. He had stood listening to the roar of the motor and the spinning of tires in loose sand, heard the swearing as they hurled blame back and forth, and then they came up out of the wash pushing the girl ahead of them.

There were three of them, boys or young men, and they wore city clothes and one of them was carrying a suitcase. Another one carried some kind of a weapon, too short for a rifle, but obviously heavy. Might be one of those tommy-guns he’d seen at the picture show. They were packing no grub and not one of them had a canteen.

Ben backed off the ridge and returned to his cabin. When he had the coffee pot on, he gathered his canteens and water sacks and hid them away. Had it not been for the girl he would have gone back up in the rocks and waited them out, and Ben was an Indian when it came to waiting.

That girl…she was in real trouble, and in Ben’s day even an outlaw would go out of his way to help a woman. It looked like she might be a hostage. Certainly, that outfit was on the dodge. That suitcase now, it might be filled with loot.

He must be careful. The last thing he wanted was a shooting. Folks asked too many questions these days, and they pried into a man’s past. It was best to let the dead past remain dead.

Ben was a hard old man whose life had been lived among hard, fiercely independent men. The law was often too far away to call, even if a man had been of a mind to. A man fought his own battles back then; most of the time he didn’t have a choice.

His baptism of fire…at least familiarity with it…came one evening when he was a youngster playing in the street back at old Fort Sumner…that was in ’81. He had seen Sheriff Garrett come up the street with his deputies, John Poe and Tip McKinney, and stop at Pete Maxwell’s place. The deputies sat down on the steps and Pat walked back to the room where Maxwell lay in bed sick.

A few minutes later he saw Billy come out of Deluvina Maxwell’s adobe, and he heard her say, “There’s a side of beef hung up on Maxwell’s porch. You cut yourself a steak and I’ll fry it for you.”

Ben had seen Billy start for Maxwell’s place and he called after him, but Billy had just waved a hand…and a minute or two later there were two gun shots. One of them had killed Billy, the other they found years later, embedded in the bottom of a wash stand. Garrett had fired and thrown himself to the floor. His second shot missed by nine feet.

Only a few of the old breed lived on. Wyatt died in ’29, George Coe, Jeff Milton, Chris Madsen and Dee Harkey in the 1940s. The old ones were like that. They lived on hard work, beef and beans and if you didn’t shoot them they’d live forever.

That outfit coming up the trail. They weren’t going anywhere, they just thought they were. Why didn’t they learn about the country before high-tailing it off into the desert that away? They must have spotted this trail and turned off into it to hide…or to cut across country to the other highway. They had ridden into a death trap, but the trouble was it could mean death for Ben Milo and for that girl, too.

He could see them come up the slope to the bench where the old mine was located. The cabin where he lived, a ramshackle sheet-metal shed and the gallows-frame over the shaft were all that remained except for a few foundations. Nobody had tried working the mine since 1905. Long after it was abandoned, Old Ben moved in, filed on several claims, and did the assessment work.

The tall one had his shirt out of his pants and he carried that tommy-gun. He was tall, but thin. The second one was thick-set and the third a gangling youngster of sixteen or so. The oldest could be no more than nineteen.

The girl? Well, say seventeen…and mighty pretty.

She took a quick look around when they reached the bench, and he would have gambled it was not the first such lay-out she had seen.

Ben Milo stepped into the door. “Howdy, folks! Glad to see you! Coffee’s on!”

The gun muzzle lifted and the stocky one started his hand toward his waist-band. So he had a gun, too.

“Coffee? On a day like this? You got a beer?”

“No ice.” Ben’s eyes went to the girl. The utter despair in her eyes had changed to hope. A body would think he was four men, the way she looked at him. What could he do? What chance did he have? “No electricity,” he added.

“No telephone?” The tall one seemed to be the boss-man. His eyes swept the area. “You’ve got a radio? TV?”

“Nothin’ like that away out here.” Ben’s eyes surveyed them mildly but shrewdly. “Like I said, no electricity.”

The tall one gestured with the gun. “Stand aside, Old Man. Buzzer, you go inside and have a look-see.”

Ben Milo moved aside, careful to make no sudden moves. The tall one with the tommy-gun had a shoulder-holster beneath his shirt. It was open far enough to make grasping the gun a simple thing.

Buzzer went up the steps and into the house. A moment later he appeared. “Nobody here.”

“There’s coffee,” Ben suggested mildly.

“What else have you got? To eat, I mean?”

“Beans…I live mostly on beans and rice. Time to time I make myself a batch of sourdough bread.”

Buzzer stood aside as they entered. “Crumby lookin’ shack. On’y two rooms. This’n and the bedroom behind the blanket.”

Ben Milo walked to the cupboard and took down cups and saucers, then poured the coffee. He had just enough cups to go around. They needn’t have said it was crumby…as desert shacks went, it was mighty neat. He always liked things kept in order. Took after his ma, that way.

“How far to the highway?”

“Quite a piece. I never go that way myself. I usually go up to Blythe.” He paused momentarily. “Or east.”

“East?”

“To the river…the Colorado.”

It was a critical moment. Old Ben Milo wanted to get them off his hands and east would be the way if they would take the bait, but it was a slim chance. He had been reading men too long to doubt the sort of man this tall one was…he would kill quickly, heedlessly, almost without thinking. Killing would be his first solution to almost any problem.

The one called Buzzer now…he was the tough one. A bad one he might be, but there was a deep toughness of fiber built into him. He would take a lot of punishment, a lot of killing.

The kid…there was a weak link. The kid had stumbled into more than he bargained for.

The easiest way out was the way they had come, and there was small chance of their making it out alive by any other way. But they were running from something and going back was probably not an option.

“What’s on the river?” Buzzer asked.

“A few fishermen, maybe. They camp along the river sometimes, launch their boats off the banks. Otherwise, there would be nothing. Just Yuma…and Mexico.” The idea was planted now. He could not raise it again without causing suspicion.

“Fix us something to eat.” The tall one slouched into a chair. He glanced at the girl. “You help him.”

She came over to Ben obediently and he showed her where the plates were. They were gray enamel dishes, the simplest kind of eating ware a man could buy. There was a big pot of beans, some rice, the remains of a loaf of sourdough. There was also a comb of honey he’d robbed from the bees in the wash over east.

With a queer certainty Ben Milo knew he was not going to get out of this alive. They would want no witnesses left behind to say where they had gone.

They did not yet realize the situation they were in…maybe the girl did. Young as she was, she had a knowing way around a desert cabin and around a mine. He had watched her, and there was a certain air of familiarity in her way of doing things.

He considered the possibility of a shoot out. He could have a try at it. His guns were cached and if he could lay a hand to one of them he might nail at least two of them before they got him. Coolly, he judged his chances and knew they were good. He was a dead shot…a little slower than of old, but once he lifted a gun he hit what he aimed at.

Only that tommy-gun would spray lead all over the cabin. He didn’t trust a gun like that and he didn’t trust the man who held it. If something happened at the wrong moment the girl was almost sure to catch some. Reluctantly, he yielded before the realities. Without the girl he might have tried it.

The tall one sat down astride a chair with the tommy-gun across his lap, his arms on the back of the chair. He turned his blue eyes to Ben Milo. “You live here all the time, Old Man?”

“Thirty years.”

“Thirty years? You must be nuts.” He turned to Buzzer. “You hear that? He’s lived in this god-forsaken desert for thirty years!”

“It ain’t so bad,” Ben said quietly.

This one thought he was tough, and would be likely to try to prove it somehow. The other one…Buzzer…he was the toughest of the lot. His eyes shifted to the third one…he didn’t belong. He shouldn’t be here at all.

The cool, tough ones a body could figure out. You could study on them and come up with an answer, but the hotheaded, rattle-brained types were dangerous to themselves and everybody else.

COMMENTS: Looking at Louis’s life, there’s a good deal of familiar territory covered in these few pages. The mining claim the old man lives on is similar to several Dad worked in his youth, though, as far as I know, none were so far south. I believe he set this story somewhere southwest of Blythe for reasons relating to the plot, so that his criminal characters can be tempted by the idea of getting to Mexico via the Colorado River. The story of the death of Billy the Kid is also something out of Louis’s past. He worked for Deluvina Maxwell one summer in the 1920s and heard her, as well as others who had actually been there, tell the story of Billy and Pat Garrett.

Though I have labeled this a “crime story” it is really a Western, contemporary to the time, probably the 1950s, when Louis wrote it. A twentieth-century Western, it contains classic Western genre elements, like commenting on the passing of the frontier era and on the conflict between generations. In this case the commonly used twitchy kid-with-a-Colt type character has been replaced by a juvenile delinquent with a sub-machine gun.